Queer as Fuck: The Soft Pink Truth's Black Metal

With his new album as the Soft Pink Truth, Why Do the Heathen Rage?, Matmos' Drew Daniel offers a slew of dance-ready black metal covers—and grapples with the genre's sorry history of violence and homophobia in the process.

Drew Daniel, an electronic multi-instrumentalist, writer, and academic who teaches literature at Johns Hopkins University, started his experimental house project the Soft Pink Truth in 2001 with a 12” called “Do It Quite Sloppily”. Matmos, his main project with partner M.C. Schmidt, rarely do anything sloppy, so the appeal of this outlet made sense from the start.

Matmos have always been willing to nod to punk (see, for instance, the track “Germs Burn for Darby Crash” as well as their cover of the Buzzcocks’ “ESP”), and Daniel wrote an entire book on Throbbing Gristle, but the gnarlier part of his record collection received its most explicit treatment on SPT’s Minutemen-nodding 2004 album, Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Soft Pink Truth?, a collection of punk and hardcore covers of bands like Crass, Angry Samoans, Minor Threat, and Rudimentary Peni. That tradition is held up on his new record, Why Do the Heathen Rage?, which is made up of black metal covers.

Daniel is an avowed metalhead, but until now you didn’t really find any obvious traces in his music. On Heathen, though, he applies SPT’s colorful, lusty style to songs by Darkthrone, Venom, Beherit, Mayhem, Hellhammer, and other grim outfits, incorporating guests like Antony, Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner, David Serrotte of the Baltimore vogue ball crew House of Revlon, and Locrian’s Terence Hannumm. Snippets from gay house classics (and porn) also play a part.

As Daniel’s made clear in the past, SPT is a queer-focused project, as shown on this LP by his cover of Seth Putnam/Impaled Northern Moonforest’s “Grim and Frostbitten Gay Bar” and artist Mavado Charon’s cover illustration of corpse-painted men fucking and murdering each other. The liner notes feature a piece called “Confessions of a Former Burzum T-Shirt Wearer”, where Daniel talks about what it means to be a gay man as well as a fan of black metal—a genre with a sketchy, violent history that includes the murder of a gay man by Emperor’s Bård “Faust”, as well as the fascism of Burzum’s Varg Vikernes. As Daniel puts it, “Just as blasphemy both affirms and assaults the sacred powers it invokes and inverts, so too this record celebrates black metal and offers queer critique, mockery, and profanation of its ideological morass in equal measure.”

Daniel and I caught up via Skype. He was in his house in Baltimore, a space packed with books, records, and his embroidered black metal t-shirt collection.

Photos by M.C. Schmidt

Pitchfork: How did you decide what songs to cover for this record?

Drew Daniel: My criteria really was: Are the riffs intensely catchy? Are the lyrics something that speaks to what black metal's about? There are a lot of black metal artists that I really love, but I didn't feel like there would be any point in attempting to cover them because they're more about textures than riffs. And part of the appeal of these songs, for me, is that there is a pop core to them. There is an intense catchiness, hopefully.

Pitchfork: There’s also the homoerotic angle.

DD: I mean, it's a weird process. The first song I covered was "Sadomatic Rites" by Beherit. I loved the sexuality of it—that there was this dwelling in a city of Sodom implicit in it, and this figure of the Sodomite. That was incredibly appealing to me. That cover was a test of whether this would be fun to do, and it was so fucking fun to do that I started to go into that bag-of-Doritos psychology: Oh, I'll just have one more. People misrepresent black metal as being completely asexual, and a lot of times its aesthetics are—solitude, misanthropy, the woods—but there is a stream of sexual content within certain early black metal bands.

As I was making the album, I felt like I wanted a historical arc. The last two I did were Venom's "Black Metal" and the Impaled Northern Moonforest track, so that felt like going from the very pioneering beginning of a genre to its apotheosis in parody. By the time Seth Putnam is doing Impaled Northern Moonforest, black metal has entered complete decadence and has become formulaic. And my own record is like the final maggots writhing in the corpse, because now I'm covering a parody. Of course, there are also bands now like Cultes des Ghoules, Locrian, and Deafheaven—people making valid new things out of black metal—so I don't want to say, "Oh, it's over." There's so much history to this genre. The events of the '90s were so long ago that there's a new relationship to their overfamiliarity as cliches that's kind of interesting and worth playing with.

Pitchfork: Right. There are tons of black metal bands in 2014 that exist without the original Norwegian narrative in mind. But not all of that violence can just be willed away. There's the non-album Burzum cover that you called “Rundgang (Fuck Varg’s Racist, Anti-Semitic Bullshit Politics Forever!)” as well as your written piece "Confessions of a Former Burzum T-Shirt Wearer". How important was it to you to situate that position so that people didn't think you were being complicit with these kinds of thoughts?

DD: It's something that I've worried about not just in a self-protective way, but in a genuinely soul-searching way. And I think about it because years ago, a church burned down in Baltimore, and I thought it would be a hilarious thing to take a picture of me in a Burzum t-shirt doing a thumbs up in front of this burnt church. The point of the photograph in my mind was that there's this incredible double standard and hypocrisy in Burzum fandom where every right-thinking liberal fan of extreme music says, "Oh, I love Burzum's music. I hate their politics." And to take a picture was to be the worst-case scenario of the person who admires the church-burning and is like, "No, let's burn churches. Thumbs up! Burn churches. That's what I like." That's the sort of thing that you're not supposed to say, but, obviously, the glamor and allure of criminality and vandalism, and a hatred of organized religion does mobilize why people are, in part, excited by Burzum. It's not just the music. I don't feel like it's acceptable to try to draw this bright line between aesthetics and politics because they're always connected. There's no politically innocent music-listening room that isn't tied to political realities.

On the other hand, it's not like art is only ever a symptom of politics. So while they're always connected, they're never the same. For me, that was why that picture was funny and why I took it. But friends of mine reacted to that image and called me out. And I have to admit, from another perspective, that's a white guy in public wearing a racist band's t-shirt—a reinforcement of white supremacy. And I really don't think it's good enough for white men to wield a word like "parody" as a shield by which to legitimize shitty behavior. So I felt real shame about that picture. And now I've embroidered "Fuck Varg's Politics" in rainbow pink thread onto the only Burzum shirt I wear. I wore it to Maryland Death Fest last year, and it got a lot of double takes and started a lot of good conversations. The more I thought about it, I was like, “Well, what do I want to do?” How could I possibly push back against Burzum in a way that wasn't just a self-congratulatory, “I’m not a racist” maneuver. So that's why I wanted to cover an ambient track of Burzum's, so that when somebody searches for "Rundgang", they'll find "Rundgang" attached to my statement.

You could also make the claim that Varg is an attention whore and I’m only playing into his importance by doing a deliberately obnoxious acid techno profanation of his tranquil, ambient 25-minute escapist trip into the woods. So is there an innocent position here? I just wanted to take that track and profane it by putting Timbaland-esque beats on top of it, so even in a supposed pastoral zone where you don't have to think about urban life, there's a racial code to the way that that ambient music functions in Varg's aesthetics, and I wanted to destroy it with this cover.

It sounds pretentious and self-important if I put it that way, and maybe it's hypocritical for me to call somebody else an attention whore in an interview for Pitchfork. I'm talking a lot because I'm nervous about this, but I felt like if you're going to do black metal covers and your point is a queer critique of the shitty ideological disaster area that is black metal, then it would be cowardly to not address the Burzum question. At first, I wanted to put that Burzum cover on the album, and I talked about it with [label head] Bettina [Richards] at Thrill Jockey, and she was like, "Look, I'm not going to put a Burzum track on an album because then when people buy your album we're giving money to Varg. That's fucked up." And I'm like, “You're absolutely right. I should just put this on the web where it can do its work of connecting the search term." It’ll attach itself like a parasite to the glamor of that dickhead, and then every time you're looking for his song, maybe you have to think about the opposite point of view.

Pitchfork: You have various guests on the album, including Antony and Jenn from Wye Oak. How familiar were they with black metal?

DD: Different people had different attitudes about what their purpose was in doing it. For Antony, I had to really talk to him about why I wanted him on this record because I don't think he likes or relates to black metal aesthetics. He's also someone who's ecological orientation makes him skeptical about fantasies of apocalypse, and there's good reasons to feel like maybe apocalyptic fantasies aren't helpful at this point. Maybe they're part of the problem. They let us off the hook. The reason I wanted Antony was because I felt that I needed an androgynous voice and energy to counter the tacit maleness of this whole genre. And I just love his voice.

In the case of Jenn from Wye Oak, people make decisions about what her aesthetic bandwidth is based on Dungeonesse or Wye Oak, but for Halloween one year, Jenn was a sexy baby. That's fucking perverse. She has a streak that can get seriously dark that you might not realize until you talk to her for a while. And I love that smoky place that she hits sonically. I felt like the idea of her soulfulness paired with this absolutely misanthropic, hateful, hateful message—"Census count zero/ No cunt Christ hero/ Glory for ebola"—would do something to those words that was really interestingly perverse.

"Black metal people aren't going to like this album because it's faggoty disco, but actual dance music people aren't going to like it because it's weird people screaming about Satan."

Pitchfork: The album begins with a spoken-word invocation that you and Antony do, how did you come up with that?

DD: I wanted some kind of spoken word intro with ominous sound effects, like the way atmospheric black metal records begin. In fact, I made a mix that's just 45 minutes of intros. It's so funny! I stuck little sound effect details in there as a kind of spell. When the line about “the forces that alienate us” happens, there's this noise which is a cash register beep and police handcuffs closing layered onto each other so they're the exact same sound.

Black metal songs often have these sonic details, even down to Varg using the sound of anvil on one Burzum track. I wanted a similar feeling. There's sonic details that are from gay porn on this album too. For the line "Riding Hell stallions bareback and free," I went online and just got bareback sex sounds of someone getting penetrated and stuck it right next to that moment in the song. It's extremely literal and on-the-nose, but fuck it.

Pitchfork: Did you have any concerns about authenticity when you did this? Would you want a black metal fan who doesn't know any of the backstory to just be like, "Yeah, this is a version of a fucked up experimental black metal record."

DD: It's something that I've often wondered about, like, “Who is the audience for this? Who in the world wants to hear this?” Nobody, basically. Black metal people aren't going to like it because it's faggoty disco, but actual dance music people aren't going to like it because it's weird people screaming about Satan. And yet, I felt like once I started I need to finish this because I need to believe in the momentum of this promise that I made to myself.

Georges Perec wrote that novel A Void where there are no words that use the letter e, and he said that when he started writing it he told a friend as a joke, "Oh, wouldn't it be cool if somebody wrote a novel without the letter e?” And then the friend was like, "No, you have to do it." And then you get trapped in it. I mean, I proposed this record kinda as a joke when I was DJing at a club. I was talking to Hunter of Liturgy and saying, "Oh, it would be so funny to do a cover of Darkthrone's 'Beholding the Throne of Might' because it has this line 'When Hell calls your name, there's no way back,' and you could cut in that classic house song ‘'No Way Back'.” And he was like, "Oh, you should do that." And then I did do it. The album is full of little Easter egg moments of quotation from classic house songs where a phrase from a classic house song is used instead of a black metal lyric, like, "Let There Be Ebola Frost" has the Marshall Jefferson "Let there be" from "Let There Be House", but instead of "house" it's "ebola." [laughs]

When you cover a song, the stakes should never be low. You can't bring a redundant wannabe imitation of the original. So a cover is, to me, a real challenge. Why does this have the right to exist? It's a test. I don't mean to sound like it's a deadly serious thing, but if you’re going to touch a classic fucking song like Venom's "Black Metal", you better not be kidding around.

Pitchfork: One thing I thought that is important on the record is that in the liner notes, you mention Bård "Faust", who murdered Magne Andreassen because he was gay in 1992. I feel like that's often a part of the black metal story that sort of gets brushed under the rug.

DD: Yeah, in fact, another reason I wanted to make a queer take back to this culture was I went to the [black metal] documentary Until the Light Takes Us, there was a Q&A with the directors afterwards, and I asked them about how they were giving people a chance to call Magne Andreassen a faggot and just letting them use that word as if that's cool. And their answer was, "Well, this is not about politics. This is just about aesthetics. We're fans." And I have to say: Fuck you! That's not good enough. I felt angry at them because I felt like they were being, at best, naïve. But at worst, dishonest about what we do when we like things. It doesn't mean we have a free pass to just bracket that kind of crime. And the ease with which people talk about that murder, as if somehow it was self-defense—I'm sorry, but you don't go to a gay cruising park with a knife and then claim that you killed this gay man out of self-defense. I just don't buy it. People totally look the other way, and as a gay man I feel like that defines black metal subculture as if it's the subculture that's cool with killing gay people and homophobia.

So I went and saw [Faust’s band] Emperor live, and they are fucking awesome. It was my birthday and I remember the drummer threw out a drumstick and I caught it. But the whole time I thought, “I'm a kind of Uncle Tom motherfucker if I'm going to see Emperor and support what they're about. They killed a gay man.” My record can't redress that kind of a crime, but it's part of a queer response to that subculture. I've also embroidered my Emperor shirt with "Rest in Peace Magne Andreassen." When I wear that, people are like, "What does it mean?" Whatever. This is my self-important indie craft project. [laughs]